The Castro brothers, who toppled the pro-American Batista regime in the 1959 revolution and ruled Cuba for 59 years, handed power to Miguel Díaz-Canel. After being elected president of the Council of State, the head of state, in 2018, Díaz-Canel revived the presidency the following year, clearly defining the character of the "post-Castro" system.
Díaz-Canel, a former electronics engineering student, has pushed economic reform and opening policies while maintaining the communist system, unlike Fidel Castro or Raúl Castro, the protagonists of the revolution. He also enacted a new constitution that guarantees the right to protest and recognizes free markets and private property. He expanded the scope of self-employment, which had been limited to about 180 small business categories, to 2,000, and granted small and medium-sized enterprise corporate status to self-employed business owners with fewer than 100 employees.
As a result, private self-employed businesses have exploded in Cuba. A new term, "Particular," emerged to refer to them. The most flourishing have been restaurants and lodging establishments. Restaurants were called Paladar Particular, and guesthouses were called Casa Particular. The growth of Particulares brought vitality to Cuba's economy, but following the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the revival of sanctions under the second Donald Trump administration, Cuba fell back into severe economic hardship.
Cuba, whose economy has been hamstrung by the Trump administration's crude oil import sanctions, recently announced an emergency economic package containing sweeping reform and opening measures. The package includes unprecedented measures such as opening the financial and real estate markets to the private sector, allowing individuals to own multiple companies, and permitting private companies with more than 100 employees. The market expects that this Particular reform will allow the private economy to take another leap forward, rising to a level where it serves as a driving force for the national economy. The world is watching Cuba's new experiment, which benchmarks the Chinese and Vietnamese models of reform and opening that marketize the economic sector while maintaining the socialist system. The success of Cuban-style reform and opening depends on another leap forward for the "Particular."
